Have you given your work away lately?

You’ll find plenty of articles on this site about how to improve the profitability of your design or marketing practice, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t also suggest that you should give away a certain amount of your time and creative genius each year to worthy causes. In the best circumstances, you get a portfolio piece and the recipient organization gets some powerful communication.

Case in point is the poster recently completed for the Seattle Library’s Teen Reading Program by several students of SVC’s letterpress classes. The poster points teen readers to this myspace page where they’re encouraged, naturally enough, to crack open some books during their vacation. 

For some good advice on the pitfalls and upsides of doing freebies, check out these probono work guidelines written by SVC in cooperation with the Seattle chapter of AIGA.

It’s back to the future with letterpress classes

The more time designers and art directors sit parked at a computer monitor dishing out pixels, the more they crave something tangible and touchable. To the rescue is the revived art of letterpress printing. At Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts, a large, neatly arranged room full of vintage flatbed and platen presses is just down the hall from the school’s Mac labs, providing some sort of karmic equilibrium. Designers are drawn to the letterpress classes because there is no “delete” key. Instead you have to plan and think through your designs very carefully before going to work. It turns out that’s not a bad way to approach digital design work, either. 

  

How to get a great website (or anything else)

We know what you’re thinking. If we wanted to read what Seth Godin had to say, we’d just go to his blog, not yours. Point taken, and we’ll stick to reporting ideas spoken at SVC in most of our future posts. But these 10 tips on how to produce a great website bear repeating, in our opinion, because they could apply to an ad, an annual report, or just about anything creative people are engaged to do. Don’t you agree?